Holy Thursday: The Sacrament is the Gospel

On the Thursday before Easter, Holy Thursday, Christians worldwide pause to recall Jesus’ celebration of his last Passover meal with his disciples and his institution of the Lord’s Supper. Yet, although most Christians observe both the remembrance of Jesus’ establishment of Holy Communion and the meal itself, Christians do not all agree on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. 

While for most of Church history, all Christians proclaimed that the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper is Jesus’ body and blood, from the sixteenth century on, some Christians have believed and taught that Jesus is only spiritually present in Holy Communion or even that this meal is merely a remembrance of the body and blood Jesus offered up for sinners upon the cross.

Sasse argues that the teaching of Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper is not just one doctrine among others, but instead that it is the beating heart of the Christian faith. 

One Christian theologian who vocally, consistently, and tenaciously confessed the belief in the real presence of Jesus’ body and blood in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper was Hermann Erich Otto Sasse. Without any exaggeration, we can assert that—apart from Martin Luther himself—Sasse was the Lutheran theologian of this Sacrament of the Altar. Sasse’s most extensive work on the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper is his 1959 book, This Is My Body. Here, Sasse explores the theology of the Lord’s Supper from the early church into the twentieth century. Sasse argues that the teaching of Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper is not just one doctrine among others, but instead that it is the beating heart of the Christian faith. 

In the pages of This Is My Body, Sasse explores the Christian church’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper in great theological and historical detail. He begins with the “first commentary on the Sacrament of the Altar,” which St. Paul “‘received’ and faithfully ‘delivered’ to the church of Corinth” in 1 Corinthians 11 (This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar, Revised Edition, pg. 1). He then traces the teaching on this Sacrament through the Church Fathers and in Eastern Christianity. He shows the development of medieval Roman Catholic theology on the Sacrament, including the emergence of the doctrines of transubstantiation (the idea the elements of bread and wine lose their essence and are transformed into the body and blood of Christ with only the visible appearances of bread and wine remaining) and the sacrifice of the mass (the idea that Jesus is sacrificed by the priest on the altar for the sins of the people each time the Sacrament is celebrated).

With the early church and medieval background in place, Sasse spends the majority of This is My Body discussing Martin Luther’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper, especially over the denials of the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament espoused by other Protestant reformers. In undertaking this detailed historical study, Sasse demonstrates that until the emergence of Reformed Christianity in Zürich and Strasbourg during the sixteenth century, belief in the real presence of the body and blood of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Sacrament was just a “given.” There was no doctrinal controversy over the real presence of Jesus in the Lord’s Supper for the first 1,500 years of Christianity, says Sasse, because all Christians believed in the real presence as a matter of course (pg. 10).

This universal recognition of the real presence in the Sacrament changed in the 1500s. Ulrich Zwingli and other reformers began teaching that Jesus’ body and blood were not present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. This symbolic interpretation of the Sacrament was later compounded by the Enlightenment’s vehement rejection of anything miraculous in the Christian faith. As a result, what had always been a given—that Christ is present bodily in the Sacrament of the Altar—was no longer recognized as a commonly accepted truth by all Christians. This disagreement about Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper persists today.

In This Is My Body, Sasse peels back 500 years of church history to find out what went wrong and how to recover the biblical teaching of Christ’s presence by looking anew at the teaching of Luther on the matter. Sasse outlines how Luther responded to Zwingli’s denial of the real presence by writing several treatises wherein Luther rejects Zwingli’s spiritualizing of Christ’s presence in the Supper and confesses the real presence. Zwingli responded in kind. 

Many Christians from the time of the Reformation to today have criticized Luther as being obstinate and rude for this refusal. However, Sasse defends Luther’s stubbornness, arguing that Luther understood the confession of the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar was even more important than Christian unity and charity.

Sasse recognizes that the centrality of Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper to the Christian faith is not built upon the tradition of the church or theological arguments but upon the words of Scripture. Yes, says Sasse, it is true that until the 1500s, Christians universally believed that the body and blood of Jesus are present in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, but this, in and of itself, does not make the belief accurate. What makes the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament eternally true, and thus binding dogma on all Christians, says Sasse, is that Holy Scripture teaches it. 

“It was the simple dogma of real presence that Luther brought along to Marburg and defended there. A dogma, a binding doctrine, not because it had been defined in the Middle Ages, not because it had been believed always and everywhere in the church—after all, there had never been any other doctrine before the Reformation—but because it said so in Scripture.” (Sasse, “On the Question of Dialog in the Lord’s Supper,” 109.)

As Sasse correctly identifies, the validity of the doctrine of the real presence rests, and must rest, on Scripture alone. This is as true today as it was for Sasse in 1958 and as it was for Luther in 1528. Jesus is present with his body and blood in his Supper because he tells us so in the Bible.

“‘This is My body’—this,” says Sasse, “was the explanation given by the Lord Himself and understood literally by His apostles. If words have any meaning at all, then 1 Corinthians 10:17 means that the bread is the body, and the same holds true in 11:27-29: “Now, who eats of this bread and drinks unworthily of this cup unworthily is guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.’ That is the doctrine Luther defended against Zwingli” (On the Question of Dialog in the Lord’s Supper, 109).

But lest it be thought that this Scriptural teaching is just one of many other doctrines in the Bible, Sasse also asserts that the real presence is absolutely central to the Christian faith. As John Kleinig has observed, Sasse recognized that the Lord’s Supper lies “at the heart of Christian worship” and that the entire worship service and liturgy of the Christian church developed around the celebration of this Sacrament and belief in Christ’s promise of his bodily presence therein. The reception of the Lord’s Supper and the belief that Jesus gives those receiving it his own body and blood is the heart of Christian worship and Christian faith (Kleinig, “Sasse on Worship,” in Hermann Sasse: A Man for Our Times?, ed. John R. Stephenson and Thomas M. Winger (St. Louis: CPH, 1998), 108-109).

The reason why, asserts Sasse, is very simple: the Lord’s Supper is the gospel. This is the conclusion Sasse reaches in This Is My Body. For the gospel is the simple and straightforward message that sins are forgiven in Jesus Christ. And here, in the Sacrament of the Altar, Jesus Himself comes and gives not only His body and blood but also, along with and in them, the forgiveness of sins. The gospel in the Sacrament, says Sasse, takes the form of the short and yet profound phrase: “Given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins” (This is My Body, pg. 310).

Sasse’s statement that “the Sacrament of the Altar is the gospel” is not meant to denigrate the presence of the gospel proclaimed in the sermon.

At this juncture, we should be careful not to misunderstand what Sasse is saying. He is saying that the promised forgiveness of sins that Jesus gives to us with his body and blood in his Supper is the gospel. Sasse is not saying that this Sacrament is the only place where the gospel can be found. He also wrote extensively on the gospel’s presence in Scripture, the church’s proclamation, Baptism, Absolution, and the sharing of the Good News of Jesus by all Christians (what Luther in the Smalcald Articles called the “mutual conversation and consolation of the saints”). Indeed, Sasse elsewhere scolds Lutheran pastors for using the presence of the gospel in the Sacrament as an excuse for laziness in not preaching the gospel effectively in their sermons.

Sasse’s statement that “the Sacrament of the Altar is the gospel” is not meant to denigrate the presence of the gospel proclaimed in the sermon. Instead, it is meant to emphasize that the denial of the real presence in the Sacrament is nothing less than a denial of the gospel itself. What comes to us in this Sacrament is not an idea, not an argument, and, ultimately, not even a doctrine. It is Jesus himself. 

In the Lord’s Supper, Jesus Christ, God the Son incarnate, comes to us and gives us himself. The Sacrament of the altar gives us the gospel because it gives us Jesus. It gives us the One “who died as the Lamb of God for the sins of the world, who will come again in glory.” It is the fully divine and fully human Christ, says Sasse, incarnate, crucified, and risen, “who is present in his gospel and his Sacrament” (pg. 1).

This does not mean that salvation is dependent upon understanding the real presence of Jesus within the Lord’s Supper, however. Salvation by Jesus through this Sacrament is not dependent upon our rationalization of such presence, and that is truly a good thing. Because no one can fully understand how Jesus is present (Sasse, “On the Question of Dialogue on the Lord’s Supper,” 110-111). We, as frail, fallen, finite, and fallible humans, cannot wrap our minds around the how of the real presence. But then again, neither can we really and truly understand how in Christ God became human, died, and rose again from the dead. The totality of the gospel message, says Sasse, remains a mystery. Because the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper is the gospel, it is, therefore, a mystery because the gospel itself is a mystery! The real presence, the incarnation, the resurrection – the gospel – is not meant to be dissected through human reason. It is something that one can only believe with the Holy Spirit’s gift of faith (“On the Question of Dialogue on the Lord’s Supper,” 110-111).

And what is faith to believe? The simple words of promise that Jesus Himself gives to us in Scripture: “This is My body. This is My blood.” These words of Jesus, nothing more and nothing less, says Sasse, are the gospel in the Sacrament. They are the words upon which Luther staked his confession of the real presence. These words are what Holy Thursday is all about. They are what makes Holy Thursday “holy.” They are words that are true and which must be trusted, upheld, and defended against any teaching to the contrary (Ibid). 

These words are the gospel not because Sasse said them, not because Luther said them, but because Christ Jesus our Lord said them. They are the gospel because Christ, who died and rose for us, says to us as he has said to his church throughout all ages: “This is My body. This is My blood.” These words are the gospel because, through them, Jesus Himself comes to us, forgives our sins, gives to us his real and personal presence, and saves us.